GreenExtra: Research Cooperation between Belgium and Brazil

(23-08-2018) Together with Brazil, Ghent University submitted a proposal to develop alternative 'green' extractive methods and use them to characterise the heterogeneous mixture of natural solutes and crop protection products in biomass sources.

'The identification of high valuable and extractable chemicals from renewable sources is very challenging', says professor Vania Zuin from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) in Brazil. Together with UFSCar, Ghent University (UGent) submitted a proposal to develop improved and more 'green' analytical methods and tools that allow more robust profiling and trace-level analysis of semi-polar and polar solutes from natural or synthetic origin in biomass. The project would be funded by a Bilateral research cooperation, supported by the FWO, a Belgian public research council, that is keen on promoting international collaboration as a driving force for excellence.

Alternative 'green' extractive methods

the GreenExtra project aims to build on the expertise of both Ghent University in developing green extraction devices and the expertise of UFSCar to analyze complex biomass materials. The green and sustainable separation of natural products from agro-industrial waste requires robust, efficient, selective, reproducible and benign analytical approaches, especially for more semi-polar and polar solutes from natural or synthetic origin in biomass.

Two of the main goals are to:

(I) develop alternative extractive materials and stationary phases for two contemporary extractive approaches: solid phase microextraction (SPME) and stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE).

(II) use these newly developed techniques ,compared to conventional techniques, to analyze more polar and semi-polar organic compounds, such as plant bioactive metabolites and pesticides, in agro-industrial waste streams.

Background

Depleting fossil resources, petrorefinery-induced pollution and a growing demand for energy & chemical products drive the transition towards a more sustainable bio-economy, which is a strategic priority in both Europe and Brazil. However, the optimal conversion of biomass and various waste streams into value-added products depends on the ability to determine the composition, the purity and quality of the biomass feedstock. As such, there is a growing need to develop improved green analytical methods that allow a more robust profiling and trace-level analyses of especially semipolar and polar solutes from natural or synthetic origin in biomass.

Recent developed miniaturized solventless extraction techniques, such as solid phase microextraction (SPME) and stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE), allow ultra-sensitive analysis of hydrophobic or non-polar solutes.  However, poor quantification and biased representation of a sample composition, when multi-residue analysis is performed, is possible because the amount of extractive material is low in SPME. By contrast SBSE, involving larger amounts of extractive material, allows significantly larger, and often exhaustive, extraction of also more polar solutes. Though, due to a lack of polar-sorbent coatings they are mostly used to determine non- or less-polar organic compounds.